Brian Barwick yesterday began his search for a manager with the X factor, but
it is the fear factor that must be eradicated if English football is to be a
force in world football again. Fear of failure, fear of ideas, fear of the
new, fear of stepping beyond our comfort zone.
Most of all, there is the undermining belief that for all our bravado and bold
pronouncements — Peter Crouch actually spoke of winning the tournament two
days before the qualification game with Croatia — we are not good enough. We
fear that, man for man, our technique will let us down against the first
good team we play. Croatia did not win because of pride or passion, the
famous red herrings of English football. They won because those two elements
remain our greatest strength and faced with a team who have them, too — and
plenty do in these days of new republics — it comes down to who is better at
football; and the good continental team will triumph.
“Wake up,” Slaven Bilic, the Croatia head coach, said, and he was right. His
team were better than ours at Wembley, as they were in Zagreb. Indeed,
Croatia have proved the toughest group opposition in England’s history,
unique in winning the home and away ties. So we lost to an able passing team
again, except this time the reckoning arrived one stage earlier than usual.
Sven-Göran Eriksson did not have opponents of Croatia’s class in any of his
qualifying campaigns — even the first one — so sailed through and had to
wait for a date with Brazil, France or Portugal for the frailty of English
football to be exposed.
Steve McClaren met his Waterloo earlier and, yes, at times he compounded
English weaknesses with some of his own — not introducing Owen Hargreaves
immediately with the score at 2-2 on Wednesday was his final, gigantic error
— but the faults will not be eradicated by the swift issue yesterday morning
of his P45. There is a crisis of confidence within our game that begins in
youth football with panicked yelps to lump the ball out of trouble rather
than play it away and continues all the way up the ladder until it manifests
itself in a national side who, if they concede one goal, immediately
compound their problem by letting in a second.
This has happened too often for it to be coincidence. Against Croatia at
Wembley, one became two within six minutes, in Moscow against Russia it took
four minutes, in the friendly with Germany in August 14 minutes, in Zagreb
eight minutes. For all his apparent aura of calm, Eriksson fared little
better. France scored twice in two minutes in 2004 and Brazil twice in five
minutes in 2002.
The fear factor makes England horribly vulnerable and it is as if the team
visibly shrink when a goal goes in. There was not one point during the match
on Wednesday at which England were in control of the situation and
throughout they bore the look of incompetent plate-spinners, dashing from
one wobbling catastrophe to the next. Already qualified, Croatia could
afford to relax, but even so they have cut an assured path through this
campaign, losing one game in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, when
the half-time news that qualification was guaranteed probably led to a
softening of attitude.
To Bilic, our endless debates over systems and tactics appear strange, but
that is because he originates from a culture in which the concept of
reworking the blueprint to suit the demands of the moment is not considered
radical. McClaren wanted to broaden English horizons, but each time was met
by a wall of resistance from those who do not see 41 years of failure as any
agent for change and players used to operating in an intellectual safety
zone.
McClaren was mocked when he said that his answer to a run of five games
without a win was to “keep going, keep going, keep doing the same things”,
but he is a product of English football, too. If his successor talks of
getting back to what English players do best — high tempo, hustle and
bustle, up and at ’em, big man up front — we will not have learnt from this
humiliation. The rest of the world has seen English high tempo for more than
four decades. Seen it, dealt with it, stuffed it. Next.
The best managers are problem-solvers, but McClaren was overwhelmed by his
injury list and the reduced number of English footballers in the Barclays
Premier League meant that the cupboard was often bare.
It used to be that an England selector had a first XI and a pretty decent
squad of reserves who could step up if required. Below that there would be
another squad of young players and solid club men who, while not capable of
sustained international class, were able to provide service in an emergency.
England used to pick a pre-tournament squad of 40 without too many raised
eyebrows and when Don Revie took over as manager in 1974, he called a
meeting of every English player in or around his squad and more than 70
received invites.
These days, an England manager has a first choice, one reserve of variable
consistency (think of the performance of Wayne Bridge, understudy to Ashley
Cole, on Wednesday) and, beyond that, nothing.
At right back, for instance, below 19-year-old Micah Richards and the
injury-stricken Gary Neville, is Phil Neville, a central midfield player, or
Wes Brown, who, at 28, is still unsure of his best position and has never
commanded a regular place at Manchester United. Below Cole and Bridge at
left back is Nicky Shorey, a good club man for Reading but no more. The
understudy for Michael Owen is a Tottenham Hotspur reserve; the replacement
for Wayne Rooney is fourth choice at Liverpool.
The build-up to this game brought talk of quotas for foreign players, but how
is that the answer? A league stuffed with second-rate Englishmen by
bureaucratic decree will not benefit the national team. The rot sets in — as
Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA’s director of football development, has
identified, without doing a whole lot about it — in youth football, which is
increasingly ruled by fear, too.
It does not figure that a country with a population of 60 million should
produce fewer gifted footballers than Croatia, with a population of 4.5
million. The characteristics of the human body are the same, so the system
must be failing. Arsène Wenger, who develops more young world-class players
— note no mention of nationality — than any manager in England, relies upon
a squad that is almost exclusively foreign-born. His one English player of
sufficient standard, Theo Walcott, was bought and even his first-team
appearances for Arsenal remain limited. Sir Alex Ferguson has had greater
success with British talent but talks a better game than statistics support.
The creative core of his team has not been native and home-grown since the
good old days, when David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt and Ryan Giggs
were part of his first-choice midfield. Rooney was bought, at vast expense,
and the future stars of Manchester United are as likely to come from Lisbon
as Lancashire.
Throughout English club football, managers are turning their backs on the
products of an environment of fear, of hurried clearances on bog-standard,
outsized pitches, of the panicky power game that is English youth football.
Walk around park pitches this weekend and you will see microcosms of the match
with Croatia: the terror of failure, the inability to keep the ball and stay
calm, the howling from without that freezes the blood and saps all
creativity. Most of all, you may see a coach who mistakenly imagines that,
like McClaren, he is in the results business and sacrifices learning on the
altar of his ego.
Barwick, the FA chief executive, spoke of a root-and-branch examination of
what went wrong with this campaign, but what does that mean? The heart of
the matter is that the rest of Europe, even some countries that we
patronisingly refer to as minnows, produce technical footballers in greater
numbers and that is a problem not going to be solved by an incoming manager
whose first priority is to qualify for the 2010 World Cup with a nation on
his back, biting its nails to the quick.
Brooking talks up his skills programme, but there is little point in teaching
a ten-year-old the Cruyff turn if he is expected to put it into practice on
a full-sized pitch with his coach screaming at him to clear his lines. The
whole process requires reform, not one executive aspect of it.
It is almost as if English footballers are out of practice in thinking about
the game. Gareth Barry was required to anchor England’s midfield against
Croatia, yet the statistics show that his touches of the ball were generally
in more advanced positions than Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, thus
negating the plan to have them breaking forward to latch on to Peter
Crouch’s knock-downs. Other countries, the Netherlands in particular, give
the sport an intellectual centre. Yet in both games, Croatia’s midfield
looked brighter than ours. Better educated. Better prepared. They knew what
they wanted to achieve and had paid attention in class.
Whoever follows McClaren will need to be a strong personality. Some of the
malaise within the English game, specifically at grass roots, is not his to
change, so all that can be done is to work on removing the fear from the
elite players. It requires a psychologist — José Mourinho or Martin O’Neill,
thinking men who may approach the problem from a fresh angle, single-minded
and unafraid.
McClaren was a hard worker, a decent chap, who came up short. There is no
shame in finishing second to Croatia, but Russia are an ordinary team and he
could not place England above them, either. In adversity, he soon became
overwhelmed by circumstances, by fear and by a mission that has grown
exponentially with this campaign. For it now takes in not just the adequacy
of 11 men, but the soul, the psyche and the competitive culture of an entire
football nation.
